Why I Built Aux Battles

Me and my friends have been playing aux battles for years before any of this existed. Someone picks a theme, everyone thinks up prompts, we write them on a literal notepad, then draw one at random and the battles start. It works. It also produces the exact same argument every single time: nobody can agree on who actually won.

That argument is the whole reason this exists. Ratings shouted across a room don't average cleanly, someone always "forgets" what they said five minutes ago, and whoever's hosting ends up doing the math in their head while everyone talks over them. A notepad and a group of opinionated friends is not a scoring system.

So I went looking for an app that could just handle the boring part: collect songs, collect votes, add them up. Every one I found wanted something first. An account. A login. A "create your free workspace" screen standing between me and a game that's supposed to start the second someone says "let's do an aux battle." For a party game, that's disqualifying.

The bar I was holding every option to was simple: could a friend join from their phone, in about ten seconds, without typing an email address into anything? Nothing cleared it, so that became the founding constraint for what I'd build instead: no accounts, nothing to install, join with a 4-letter code and a name. Everything else about the game got built around protecting that one requirement.

This post is backdated to the day the repository was created, before any of that existed as a working app. Google hadn't even found the site yet, Search Console has nothing recorded for this date at all. Everything from here is what got built to actually deliver on the idea above, starting with the next post: getting an MVP shipped, badly, in a single day.